Why I Decided To Promote Clickfunnels As A Way To Build a Passive Income Business

December 31, 2018

The Goal of Passive Income

The Holy Grail of affiliate marketing is to earn passive income – a steady stream of money that rolls into your PayPal and bank accounts. An income stream that you can predict and rely upon, month after month. A source of moolah that you don’t have to actually work for.

That is the dream, isn’t it?

How Affiliate Marketers Actually Work

Most affiliate marketers are lazy. I know I am. We want to earn instant commissions on sales made through our websites. More traffic equals more sales, right?

You may be hawking products you haven’t even bought yourself but they sound good, so they’ll appeal to your visitors, right? But how can you stand over something you’ve no direct experience of using yourself?

You have no relationship with your visitors (most of whom are not repeat visitors) so you’re very unlikely to get repeat customers. Your buyers are more likely to be be what I call drive-by buyers.

You’re not building an email list of potential customers and buyers that you can build a relationship with and market to again and again.

Being Smarter

Smarter marketers are a little less lazy and use incentives to prompt visitors into buying from them. A typical example of this is providing oodles of bonuses that are worth more than the product itself.

However, many make the mistake of offering tatty, old PLR products that are outdated or practically useless.

Even if you’re one of those who does your best to provide quality, related, relevant bonus products, you’re still not building an email list.

Taking Affiliate Marketing Seriously

The smartest marketers will build an email list. This is a business asset that’s independent of the whims of Google (especially) and endless algorithm updates which can affect how your money sites rank.

The simplest way to build a list is to put an optin form on your website.

But what if you want to collect the email addresses of people who buy through your links?

How do you do that when the traffic is ultimately being sent to the seller’s product page.

One way to do that is to ask your customers to hand over their email address before you direct them to the download page for your bonuses. This approach could annoy some of the people who did buy through your link though.

Another is to simply add an optin form to your bonus download page. You’ll get fewer signups this way but it’s more customer-friendly.

With these types of franchise, your affiliate links are included in the emails sent out automatically to people who bought a product through your link.

With some of these, you get to own the email list and can send your own promotions to subscribers. With others, emails are simply tagged with your affiliate links but you have no direct access to the list itself.

A business-in-a-box is a great way to start if you’re a newbie to list building. All the hard work is done for you. There are no emails to write, products to research, blog posts to write, autoresponders to pay for.

Everything you need is in “the box”.

And while that’s working on your behalf in the background, you can learn how to go about building a list yourself so you can build your own business asset.

Passive Income Is The Holy Grail

But the prime goal of affiliate marketers is to generate lasting passive income streams.

This is the sell-it-once-get-paid-regularly-thereafter idea.

You’re not constantly hawking new products to your website visitors and having to write new content to promote those products.

Instead, you direct people to a quality evergreen product that provides real value or an indispensable service.

And that product will sell itself continuously because of its quality.

And people will be happy to pay for it month after month.

And you earn a commission each and every month for every subscriber you’ve sent to it.

The Clickfunnels Affiliate Program

I didn’t pay it much attention. It just seemed to be another internet marketing tool in a sea of such tools.

Yeah, it built squeeze pages (optin pages) and did some other stuff but there were plenty of WordPress plugins that could do that too.

So I forgot about it.

Then a few months ago, I started hearing a lot of talk about sales funnels.

We’re all familiar with them: you buy a front-end product, get subjected to a number of one time offers, upsells and downsells and maybe get added to the seller’s email list.

The thing is, that now it was affiliate marketers who were building sales funnels, not just product creators.

And I started hearing about Click funnels again.

So I looked into it. Again, I had the same thoughts – why would I pay monthly for a service that does the same job as a WordPress plugin that I pay for only once?

Clickfunnels is the brainchild of Russell Brunson who’s been in internet marketing for 15 years. Over that time he’s created and built up several businesses (some of which he’s sold on). So he has a long track record of of success and coming up with great products.

So that was one of the factors that made me go with Clickfunnels.

Another was that he’s a very successful email marketer. In fact, what Russell doesn’t know about marketing in general probably isn’t worth knowing.

He put his expertise in building sales funnels and email marketing front and center when he created Clickfunnels. So knowing a knowledgeable businessman was behind the service was another factor.

Since I’m always on the lookout for new products and services to promote, I checked if they had an affiliate program.

Well, of course they did.

Free To Join Affiliate Program

Anyone can sign up which was nice to see. I hate when someone charges you to become an affiliate. This is usually under the guise of “we only want quality affiliates” when it’s really about “we want your money”.

Clickfunnels also allows affiliates to sign up sub-affiliates and earn a small percentage of the subscriptions they bring in. This doesn’t come out of an affiliate’s 40%. It’s an extra commission of 5% paid bt Ckickfunnels to affiliates who recruit other affiliates.

Affiliate Bootcamp

Russell is estimated to be earning somewhere in the region of $100 million every year. And Click funnels is a huge part of that.

There’s an affiliate bootcamp provided for affiliates as well if they want to get serious about promoting Clickfunnels.

I did sign up for that but got distracted by other things and ended up not completing the training.

This is a problem we all face in this business. So many products and services are released each and every day that it’s hard not to lose focus and be distracted by the latest shiny object.

So, yes, I fall prey to it too from time to time. 🙂 or should that be 🙁 ?

Promoting Clickfunnels

There are many associated products that affiliates can promote too, to ultimately direct people to Clickfunnels itself from free books like The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook (if you’re looking for a free sales funnel template, you’ll find 22 of them in this free ebook) to DotCom Secrets and Expert Secrets (just pay shipping for them) to webinars and Funnel Fridays where Russell and his team will build a funnel for someone for free.

?

While I hadn’t subscribed to Clickfunnels at this point myself, I felt it was a product worth promoting. It provides a truly useful service, especially for people who are creatively more than technically minded.

And, since I’d only managed to sell one copy of DotCom Secrets, I knew I had to take a different approach to marketing the service.

So I started looking for the top Clickfunnels affiliate marketers to see if they offered any training. Two people came out on top – Spencer Meacham and Rachel S. Lee.

I initially was going to follow Spencer when Zach Crawford was recommended to me.

And after looking into what all three were offering, I finally decided to follow Zach and make him my new mentor.

Spencer offers some good free training but if you want to clone his Clickfunnels sales funnel, you need to buy it and the training that goes with it ($37). You can also buy the email series ($47) he sends to people who sign up to his free training optin page. Spencer also offers an in-depth affiliate marketing program, tied in with Clickfunnels, for $897.

All three affiliates offer you their Clickfunnels sales funnel for free. However, these funnels were built inside of Clickfunnels. So you have to use it to clone their sales funnels. They can’t be imported into other squeeze page builders.

The Clickfunnels free trial lets you test the system out for 14 days. That lets you use it to clone these funnels (as well as the 22 funnels in the free Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook) and see if the arrangement suits you.

The reason I decided to make Zach Crawford my mentor is that he provides a full affiliate marketing training program for free if you sign up to Clickfunnels directly under him or one of his students/affiliates.

That’s in addition to the funnel and the email sequence that you send out (it’s part of the funnel).

Zach’s training program is $497 if you want to buy it separately.

So Zach’s offering looked the best to me. If anyone signs up to Clickfunnels under you, using his cloned funnel, you get the ongoing 40% commission on that, not Zach.

If someone buys his course through your cloned sales funnel, you get a 50% commission on sales ($248.50).

Zach makes his money from people who sign up directly under him, from the 5% commissions earned from sub-affiliates and sales of his own training course.

It’s a well thought out business plan. It’s how to make a passive income.

Following Zach’s Training

This is what the Members’ Area of his Top Earner Mentor training program looks like (remember, you get the course for free if you sign up for Clickfunnels):

I’ve now been through about two thirds of Zach’s training. Most video training I watch is boring. It’s an effort to sit through it (I’m more of a reader than a watcher). But Zach’s training IS easy to watch. It’s informative and fluff-free and I find that I look forward to watching his next training video.

I did take up the free trial of Clickfunnels and now I’m on the $97 per month plan.

Cloning and editing his sales funnel gave me an insight into using Clickfunnels as a real user, with first-hand experience of using the tool and I do like what I see.

Yes, I can build my own funnels using WordPress, a squeeze page builder like InstaBuilder or OptimizePress and an autoresponder but it’s hard work interconnecting everything. And I’d have to write all the copy from scratch (and I’m not a copywriter).

Clickfunnels really does make building funnels easier. Plus you can import other existing sales funnels and just tweak them for your needs.

Only you can tell if $97 (or indeed $297) per month for the tool is worth it.

For me it was and I’m going to be moving more of my promotions over to the sales funnel model from here on out.

Sales funnels are far more effective in converting traffic into sales than blog posts are because they serve up multiple reminders to people about the product you’re promoting.

Plus, I’m building a list at the same time. So even if I don’t get a sale now, I might do days, weeks or months from now because I can keep marketing to that list.

And, if Clickfunnels ultimately doesn’t appeal to a subscriber, I can market other products.

The other plus is that the list I’m building is fully owned by me. I have full control over it.

Conclusion

But if you want to be a successful affiliate, generating a smart passive income of $4,000 or more each and every month, then take a serious look at Zach’s training program. It’s one of the better passive income opportunities.

Many of his students make a lot more than that from promoting Clickfunnels and he’s made it as straightforward as possible to follow in his footsteps.

You can sign up here to get some free training which will give you a better idea of what he’s offering.

That’s the decision I took and his business model is what I’ll be focusing on from here on out.

I’ve only just finished editing my sales funnel and made it live, so I’ve nothing to report yet in terms of signups or revenue. But as time passes, I’ll post my results here, good or bad.

This is a change in business direction for me. But I’ve been stuck in my current position for too long and a change was overdue.

13 thoughts on “Why I Decided To Promote Clickfunnels As A Way To Build a Passive Income Business”

I’ve read a few articles regarding Clickfunnels, all have had positive things to say about it. But I also learned a lot about promoting and improving my current website as well, especially when it comes to building an email list. I’m going to get started with this pronto and keep the tab to this article up, too, since it’s about the fifth positive article speaking positively about Clickfunnels. I also like the fact I can sign up for free to get an idea of what the system looks like, which is what also attracted me to Wealthy Affiliate. I’m excited to see all that Clickfunnels has to offer in greater detail.

Hi Todd, it took me a while to finally take the plunge on the free trial. I wanted to be in a position to have the time to test drive Clickfunnels rather than having the trial time expire before I actually got to use it.

I like learning from example and Zach Crawford’s funnel (the one he freely shares) gave me a great insight into how a sales funnel is constructed and how easy it is to create on in Clickfunnels.

One think I forgot to mention in my post is that the Clickfunnels autoresponder is only included in the Enterprise plan (the $297/mth option). I already had an Aweber (autoresponder) account, so I didn’t need this feature. The emails that Zach provides can be quickly copied and pasted into Aweber (or any other autoresponder) and then whatever email list you want to use can be quickly connected up to Clickfunnels.

It does mean that I’m paying for both Clickfunnels ($97/mth) and for Aweber. If the time comes that I need the extra features in the Enterprise plan and to have an all-in-one solution, then I’ll upgrade to to the $297/mth plan. At the moment, the less expensive plan suits my needs.

I’ve set up a squeeze page on my website giving away a free email course that shows people how to make money online.

It’s congruent with the theme of my website (how to make money online), and I’ve thrown in the ‘bonus’ of getting free access to my Mastermind Facebook group if they subscribe (purpose = build an audience).

I think that the copy is good and it’s pretty clean looking with a clear CTA.

Hi Dan, how are you driving traffic to your squeeze page? Do you have optin forms in your sidebar or at the bottom of posts? Are you driving traffic to your squeeze page from links in your blog content? Are you driving traffic from outside of your site from social media, YouTube or paid ads?

It could be that people are just not seeing your squeeze page.

If your page is getting a decent amount of traffic but people aren’t signing up, that could be because:

your copy doesn’t resonate with them

your free email course isn’t enticing enough to get them to sign up

you’re asking them for both their name and email address – people are more likely to sign up if they only have to hand over their email address

you’re using double-optin rather than single-optin. Double-optin means a subscriber gets sent an email where they have to click a link to confirm they want to sign up to your list. This can be too much hard work for some. Or that email might be missed for a variety of reasons, so they never click and they don’t become a subscriber

Thes best squeeze pages have about a 50% signup rate. But that’s because the creators are constantly split testing and tweaking them to increase conversion rates. You need enough traffic to be able to split test reliably though.

It could be that your squeeze page is simply not engaging your audience. Maybe make some tweaks to it to see if that improves things.

As to CB Passive Income, yes it could help you out. All the squeeze pages in it are prebuilt for you. They’ve all been tested, tweaked and tuned. There are good products being given away on them. And the whole email marketing / list building back-end is handled for you automatically.

You only need to drive traffic to your squeeze page. But driving traffic is a whole other topic in itself.

The only things to be aware of with CB Passive Income are that you have to pay for it month after month and if you want to build a list that you personally own, you’ll need to buy the Inbox Pro upgrade which allows you to add subscribers to a list in your own autoresponder.

Without that upgrade, the list gets built inside of CB Passive Income and you don’t own it. You can’t email people on it yourself and you can’t export a list of your subscribers.

If you stop subscribing to CB Passive Income, and you didn’t buy the Inbox Pro upgrade, then you lose your list and emails sent to your subscribers will no longer contain your affiliate links.

Hi Dan, I use sidebars on all my sites as you can see from this one. I have a mix of navigation and ads in my sidebars. They are probably boiler-plate as they’re the same on every page and post (but the ads are randomized).

It’s a standard blog setup so I’d be surprised if Google penalised sites because of their use. Big sites use them too. But website design is a very personal thing.

From what you’ve said, your squeeze page is tucked away on your site and only accessible from the navigation menu. So I’d say many of your visitors just are not aware it’s there.

Since your site doesn’t use a sidebar, I’d suggest you try adding an optin form at the bottom of each of your posts. When visitors get to the end of a post, they’re more primed to sign up to your list if they like what they’ve read.

As you can see on my site, I have an optin form on each post. I don’t have one in my sidebar because I think there’s enough in it already.

I use the Header & Footer plugin to add the optin form. It can place a code snippet in the same place on all pages on a site so you don’t have to spend hours manually adding the form to all your existing posts. If you ever need to change it, you only have to make the edit inside the Header & Footer plugin.

I think what Google doesn’t like are interstitial ads/popups – these are full page ads that a reader is forced to look at. Smaller popups (like a text message at the top of a page) aren’t a problem. I use a service called Conversion Gorilla (I have a review of it here) to provide the colored-bar popups on this and some of my other sites.

I set my popups to appear when a visitor goes to exit my site. These popups don’t work on mobiles. So that’s not an issue.

Yeah, Facebook doesn’t like the Make Money Online niche. There’s quite a few groups and pages on Facebook dedicated to the niche though (internet marketing, affiliate marketing, home business, etc groups) that you could join and tell people about your squeeze page and offer.

They’re not very responsive though as everyone else in these groups is pretty much touting their own offers. I prefer to be a contrarian and post links to my blog posts instead. These stand out from all the offers and different is good. You can build up some trust with people this way as they learn that you’re not just trying to shove the latest shiny object in their faces.

Solo Ads can be a mixed bag. Some terrible ad sellers, some ok and some superb ones. You have to find the best ones through trial and error and some expense in buying ads. The best place to go to buy solo ads is Udimi. The rating system there, and comments from other buyers, will show you who at least is worth considering and who to avoid.

Never buy more than 100 clicks from any ad seller you’ve not tried before. 100 clicks will be enough to see if they’re sending you decent traffic or crap. If you like what you see, then you can scale up to buying bigger click packages.

YouTube seems to be the best place for driving leads and traffic. So, yes, that does mean making regular videos. If you’re uncomfortable in front of the camera (like me) then use a service like Content Samurai to create your videos. You can see some of the videos I’ve made with it in my review here.

If you are ok with being on camera, then all you need is a smartphone and a quiet environment to record a video.

There’s two ways to drive traffic from YouTube:

1. Put your link into your video description and into your video (as a text slide at the end of your video). This method is still being taught in many courses but it can be counter-productive.

If you’re new to uploading videos to YouTube, then you need to prove to them that you’re a trustworthy partner. What this means is that you upload valuable, content-driven videos that people will watch to the end.

YouTube have gone like Facebook. Neither want content providers to be sending subscribers off the platform to their blogs, other social media platforms or to affiliate offers. And neither is at all happy when you post your profile links to other social media platforms.

If Google see that people don’t spend time watching your videos or you’re constantly sending viewers off to other sites, they’ll actually throttle your traffic. So your videos won’t get the exposure they otherwise would have.

You may have to wait a few months until you’ve established your channel before you can start putting links into your video descriptions without being penalised.

You have to have a long view when using YouTube to drive traffic these days. But it is worth it in the long run.

2. The other way to drive traffic with YouTube is to create short videos that are obviously video ads and advertise them through the YouTube Ads platform.

This is actually part of Adwords, so you will need an Adwords account. Those skippable video ads you see at the beginning of some videos are being advertised this way. Video ads can also be placed in the “Recommended Videos” sidebar on YouTube. Clicks are currently cheaper than Facebook ads.

This is an area I’m very new to myself so I can’t give advice on what to do. I haven’t run any video ads myself. You’d need to pick up a course on advertising on YouTube.

Zach Crawford (who I mentioned in my post above) is updating his YouTube training module and it will include training on how to run and place YouTube ads. That’s part of the training course you get for free if you sign up to Clickfunnels using any of the links in my post.

Another course to look at is Sarah Staar’s Video Hacker Pro course (also $497). This teaches how to make videos that drive subscribers and sales as well as how to do YouTube Ads. She has a free course here that should give you some good ideas.

Sarah drives almost all of her traffic from YouTube using the methods she describes in her (paid) course. There’s a bit more about this in this blog post.

Lastly, my Email List Building Techniques site has a lot of information about how to do list building and email marketing. Hopefully, that will be a useful resource.

Very interesting article indeed!I didn’t know about that Clickfunnels can do such a great job in automating the process of getting more customers. The training seems a little bit expensive, but it’s still worth buying. I still got a question: can you use Clickfunnels to sell your online courses?

Hi Sebastian, Clickfunnels is essentially a page builder but it specializes in building squeeze pages and other pages that are part of a sales funnel and interconnecting them all.

Clickfunnels itself doesn’t automate the process of getting more customers. They’ve created a fantastic affiliate program for that but it’s up to you to tell others about Clickfunnels and direct them to it via your affiliate links. Zach Crawford’s paid training shows you how to promote Clickfunnels through the use of a sales funnel, built in Clickfunnels itself. This saves you having to create your own funnel from scratch (why reinvent the wheel?)

His system is what you use to drive new customers to Clickfunnels. You don’t have to use it. You can simply promote your Clickfunnels affiliate links in whatever way you choose. I just like the idea of Zach’s done-for-you solution.

If you’re not a Clickfunnels user, then sign up for Zach’s free online course (that explains this passive income business) using any of the links in my post above (or this link). If you subscribe to Clickfunnels through any of the links in the free course, then you’ll get Zach’s $497 training program, plus the sales funnel, for free.

To make that simpler:

Sign up for Zach’s free online course

Go through the short course

Sign up for Clickfunnels through any of the links in Zach’s free course

You’ll get free access to Zach’s $497 course and the sales funnel that promotes Clickfunnels

If you’re already a Clickfunnels customer, then you have to pay the $497 for his course.

So if you’re going to use Clickfunnels anyway, you might as well get Zach’s Passive Income course and funnel as a free bonus.

You can’t use Clickfunnels directly to sell your online courses. What you would do is build a sales funnel in Clickfunnel that promotes your course and then you’d drive traffic to your squeeze page.

You can actually build membership sites in Clickfunnels so you can manage everything from the one dashboard. Zach’s training course is actually a membership site built and hosted by Clickfunnels.

Many thanks for this positive review on Clickfunnels, its very informative and detailed.

I myself am a member of Clickfunnels and I totally agree with your assessment 100%. It’s everything that you have described it and more.

The fact that it will do wonders for our organisations, dropshipping, email marketing or whatever line of business we are in, the big bonus is the Affiliate Program that is attached to CFs.

Russell Brunson was a very forward thinking guy and obviously saw a gap in the market. But he hasn’t sat on his laurels with this success and as we speak, he is beta testing further developments and improvements in Clickfunnels, which has to be admired.

Well done again on a great informative article and best wishes on your adventures.

I already have ideas for several funnels I want to build for other products and services I promote. While I’m a techie, sometimes the tech gets in the way of the creative process rather than facilitating it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that Clickfunnels enables the creative process. 🙂